Writing for Pam’s House Blend yesterday, Scott Rose of Demand Equality put together a handy list of Maggie Gallagher’s “greatest hits” — a selection of some of her most egregiously bigoted, maliciously anti-gay lies. The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but I want to call particular attention to the first item on Rose’s list:
1) In response to Richard Kim’s February, 2012 charges that Gallagher had called homosexuality a “sexual dysfunction” and that she had spoken in support of “Pray-away-the-gay” “therapy,” Gallagher lied by saying “I have not done any of those things!” and “You’ve just made up a bunch of facts that aren’t true.”
In her May, 2001 article “Fixing Sexual Orientation,” however, Gallagher argues in favor of “Pray away the gay” “therapy” and calls homosexuality a “dysfunction.”
Naturally, since we know a thing or two about the “pray away the gay” myth here at Truth Wins Out, this piqued my curiosity. But I was stunned by what I found when I clicked through to Gallagher’s Townhall.com article, especially because I knew that a major story refuting the most infamous “ex-gay” research study ever conducted was about to go public. Gallagher writes:
Dr. Robert L. Spitzer is a brave man.
He was a brave man back in 1973 when, as a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Task Force on Nomenclature, he met with gay activists. As a result of his intervention, the APA, while rejecting the argument that homosexuality is “a normal variant of human sexuality,” agreed it “does not necessarily constitute a disorder.”
He was an even braver man this week when he reported the results of a new study of 200 “ex-gays”: “(S)ome people can change from gay to straight, and we ought to acknowledge that,” as he told the Associated Press.
Sixty-six percent of the men and 44 percent of the women studied achieved what he terms “good heterosexual functioning,” a sustained loving and sexually satisfying relationship with a partner of the opposite sex, as well as never or rarely fantasizing about somebody of the same sex. Dr. Spitzer’s sample was not random. He cannot tell us what proportion of motivated homosexuals could achieve normal sexual relationships with members of the opposite sex.
Research into effective voluntary therapies for same-sex attraction disorder receives very little funding and a surprising amount of professional intimidation. Even so, these results are remarkable.
Certainly gay activists think so. “I’m appalled, absolutely appalled — it’s not scientific,” psychologist Barbara Warren of Manhattan’s Lesbian and Gay Service Center told the New York Post. Then she shifted into totalitarian high gear: “I cannot believe Columbia would allow any of its professors to do anything like this.”
Gay activists have staked their political claims to normalization of unisex marriage and relationships on the race analogy: Sexual orientation is not a “lifestyle choice”; it is a fixed, unchangeable, probably biological characteristic. To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of sexual orientation research, this position is no longer scientifically tenable. Research on identical twins, for example, reveals varying rates of “concordance,” but usually well under 50 percent. Though there may be some biological influences, scratch the idea of a gay gene.
That’s right: those are the words of Maggie Gallager — one of America’s most high-profile anti-gay bigots and the country’s most outspoken proponent of marriage discrimination — explicitly endorsing the “ex-gay” myth and citing the officially-discredited Spitzer study to justify her twisted views.
Gallagher very carefully monitors the things that are said about her online. Since there’s a distinct possibility that she may very well read this article, I wish to address her directly: today, Dr. Robert Spitzer repudiated the very same study that you lauded in your 2001 column. In doing so, and in seeking a retraction from the journal that published his research, he displayed remarkable integrity. Now it’s your turn: if you are a person of integrity, you must publicly retract your citation of the Spitzer study and your endorsement of the “ex-gay” myth. I emphatically call on you to do just that.
Which will it be, Maggie? Will you choose to act with integrity and admit you were wrong, or will you do what you usually do — attempt to re-cast the situation in a way that paints you as the victim and absolves you of any responsibility to the truth? I anxiously await your answer.
